Comment by echelon

And I find that harm to be far less than the harm caused by identifying everybody all the time and censoring topics to people based on government provided tokens.

You're restating the problem, but the issue is with the proposed solution. Creating a surveillance state in an attempt to improve society is myopic. We know a surveillance apparatus will be abused to oppress people (it's already happening in the US: we have stories all the way back to the NSA/Snowden, but just last week Flock cameras were being abused to stalk ex-girlfriends, the list is endless), so pushing for that particular approach creates a bigger problem (authoritarian surveillance state) than it solves (some kids watching porn and tiktok).

Edgar Friendly got it right, back in 1993:

> See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice. I'm the kind if guy who wants to sit in a greasy spoon and think, "Gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbecued ribs with the side order of gravy fries?" I want high cholesterol. I want to eat bacon, butter and buckets of cheese, okay? I want to smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in a non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green Jello all over my body reading Playboy magazine. Why? Because I suddenly might feel the need to. Okay, pal? I've seen the future, you know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sittin' around in his beige pajamas, drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing "I'm an Oscar-Meyer Wiener".

Are you sure it's just kids?

In dealing with the ills of social media, you do what you do with every other negative externality - you tax it. At least the parts of it you don't like.

Designing privacy, freedom, and liberty destroying mechanisms is not the way.

Big social wants these regulations to pass so that they can get better identity tracking for ads targeting. To them it doesn't matter if the tech ushers in 1984. It makes them more money.

I remember the video nasties of the 90s were 'far from imaginary dangers' for kids, before that it was rock music that the data was screaming at us about. Maybe social media does hold an actual danger this time, but we are a hysterical bunch of knee-jerk reactionary nutjobs, when it comes to new things and kids.

I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years from now we see social media as just another hysterical reaction that generated a generation of bad law, wrecking, or diminishing a number of lives, for no good reason at all.

It's no coincidence cigarettes were named 'torches of freedom' to get women to start paying up for the privilege of using them a hundred years ago.

The data isn't screaming at us. That's an illusion caused by the flood of bad academic papers on the topic.

A good example is the Jonathan Haidt/Aaron Brown fiasco from a few years ago. Brown has been methodically trying to stop the stampede off yet another pseudo-scientific cliff but not enough people are listening.

https://reason.com/2023/03/29/the-statistically-flawed-evide...

https://reason.com/video/2024/04/02/the-bad-science-behind-j...

https://reason.com/2023/05/30/not-every-study-on-teen-depres...

> In a recent article for Reason, I argued that the hundreds of studies that New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has assembled to support his claim that social media is causing the teen mental health crisis not only don't back up his claim; they undermine it.

Age verification campaigners like Haidt play a smooth game but consistently downplay how useless social science actually is for answering questions like this:

> I didn't express "concerns" about specific studies; I argued that the majority of the 301 papers cited in his document are garbage. I went through each category of studies on Haidt's list, chose the first one that studied social media and depression to get a random sampling, and then showed that they were so embarrassingly bad as to be completely useless. They were guilty of coding errors, fatal defects hidden in mid-paper jargon, inappropriate statistics, longitudinal studies that weren't longitudinal, experiments in name only, and red flags for hypothesis shopping and p-hacking (that is, misusing data analysis to yield results that can be presented as statistically significant).

It's possible that in the past few years a wealth of robust evidence has suddenly emerged but it seems doubtful.

This stuff does matter. If you misdiagnose the problem then congrats, you just let governments censor the internet - quite possibly creating a China style totalitarian system that pretends to be democratic along the way - and kids will still have the same problems. A bad outcome!

Why are we only focused on kids? the boomers are doing more harm to the society and democracy by spreading mis-information via social media. If we want to have an honest conversation let's talk about every age group and limit it to everyone rather than using kids as a scapegoat

EU? It's mostly happening elsewhere though. See: Australia. See: California. See: KIDS act. See: KOSA.

Sounds like denial or tunnel vision.

The legal guardian is responsible for gatekeeping what their minor sees or does not see.

I'd seen all the shock websites by age 12. Kids love to prank each other.

None of this is a real harm. The real harms are the government being able to put a muzzle on speech, track who says what, and begin to cordon off areas of thought and expression.

You might think it's a win that this is happening, but you won't be the one in charge and you won't have a say how it's used against you.